Black Like Them

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Not since pre-Civil War blackface minstrelsy has popular culture been such a racial free-for-all. And there's certainly no shortage of opinions on why this is (a) evil; (b) liberating; (c) inevitable; or (d) good for a few laughs and that's about it. Blacks remain suspicious of whites who identify too closely with African American culture, primarily because those same whites often want to appropriate the culture completely. Traditionally, this suspicion has taken two forms--the Elvis Syndrome and the White Negro Problem. The former has to do with money and fame and goes like this: Elvis Presley, a white man, became the biggest pop star of this century by singing and dancing like a black man, and from the Rolling Stones to New Kids on the Block, the process has repeated itself as blacks create and whites luxuriate; any white artist who follows such a path is suspect (for the hip-hop era, see the Vanilla Ice Virus). The second has to do with social status and sex and goes like this: In 1957, as the Beat Generation went pop with the publication of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, novelist Norman Mailer wrote a widely cited essay for the political journal Dissent called "The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster." Ennobling white "urban adventurers" clued into black "existential" dread via the "Negro jazzman." Mailer posited a sexual freedom ride for any white kid with the appropriately cool droop: "I believe it is the absolute human right of the Negro to mate with the white."

Usually when you read about white kids who appropriate hip-hop--be it rapping or forming faux gangs--Elvis and Mailer are invoked. These folks tower over the subject like priapic parents, while smug journalists shrug off the phenomenon as nothing new and rather embarrassing to boot. Of course, it is nothing new. In his groundbreaking 1993 work, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford), Eric Lott could have been nodding at the wigger (or the gangsta) when he wrote, "If . we are to understand anything more about popular racial feeling in the United States, we must no longer be satisfied merely to condemn the terrible pleasures of cultural material such as minstrelsy, for the legacy is all around us." The minstrel shows of the 19th century (in which both white and black performers wore the cork mask to fulfill audience fantasies), like pop culture of the 1990s (in which both whites and blacks customize their personas to "keep it real"), probably tell us more than we want to hear about our democratic experiment. Blackface was an exorcism of prejudice, self-hatred, forbidden lust, and genuine respect; it threw out feelings onstage that couldn't be expressed anywhere else. These days, to suggest that a white kid's immersion in black culture might be a natural, even progressive step is to risk charges of malicious naïveté. But maybe what's maliciously naive is to expect American teenagers to have any idea who they are.

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